Here
he’s
been able to do the kind of work
he likes. He’s taught everything from freshman composition
and English Lit survey to a senior honors seminar on King Arthur.
He started a writing center and has become the resident expert
on computer-assisted classrooms. He’s taught the freshman
experience course and helped the college experiment with on-line
and “blended” courses (part classroom, part distance
learning). In May, he became dean of graduate and professional
programs.

Despite
its location, an hour from New York, Hackettstown feels rural
and the right size for its college. Grigsby’s
wife, Carolyn Coulson-Grigsby, another medievalist, teaches theater
and
literature at Centenary. (They met when she was a graduate student
at the University of Connecticut. She organized a conference
at which he presented a paper.) Everyone on campus knows their
daughter,
Eliza Marie, coming up on 3, who uses the great seal inlaid in
the floor of the main administration building as her own personal
tap dance stage. His best friend and soccer teammate from Moravian,
Pete Morgan ’91, teaches art in the area’s Mount
Olive School District.

Grigsby
is a bit rueful to discover that more than half his life—18
of his 34 years—has been spent in school. (He’s never
held another kind of job since he was 16, when he was a lifeguard
at a New York state beach, except for a brief time as aquatics
director for the Red Cross of the Lehigh Valley when he was in
college.) There’s a certain irony to his ending up as a
specialist in the history of medicine. “I didn’t
want to be a doctor because I didn’t want to go to school
that long,” he
says. “And what happened? I went even longer.”

“.
. . many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death, Called
him soft names in many a
muséd
rhyme, To take into the air my quiet breath; Now more than ever seems it rich
to die. . .”

When
John Keats (1795-1821) wrote his “Ode to a Nightingale” he
had just witnessed his brother’s death from the nineteenth century’s
greatest plague—tuberculosis—and was shortly to become a victim
of it himself.

As Bryon Grigsby points out, people
often react to epidemics by looking for scapegoats and treating
the victims brutally. But they may
also sublimate their
fears in ways less harmful (at least to others).

The romantics of Keats’s
time, not surprisingly, romanticized death. Later in the nineteenth century,
the Victorians sentimentalized it, painting
innumerable pictures of innocent girls dying of consumption, completely
glossing over, as Susan Sontag notes in Illness as Metaphor, the ugly
details of the
disease. (Mimi in Puccini’s La Boheme expires beautifully, with
plenty of breath for her final aria.) The market for melancholy memorabilia
flourished.
(A Staffordshire pottery company in the late nineteenth century even
produced a “funeral teapot,” glazed in black with gold trim
and tastefully decorated with forget-me-nots.)

In the face of the Black
Death of the fourteenth century, people sometimes
reacted by treating it playfully. Boccaccio’s Decameron depicts
a group of friends waiting out the plague by telling bawdy tales. And
just as medieval
people took the edge off their fear of witchcraft and damnation by portraying
the Devil as a buffoon in the mystery plays, they made Death into a clown
in a characteristic art form of the time. In series after series of woodcuts
depicting
the “Dance of Death,” a relentlessly cheerful-looking figure
of Death invites bishop and warrior, physician and nobleman, priest and
merchant, maiden and grandmother, to join his grotesque capers.